But Freed saw the move as an opportunity to fix a problem that he felt has plagued several area businesses for quite some time: the struggle that a lot of startups face in progressing their businesses.

So he and several of his former executives at ForeSee have come back together to form a consulting and management company called 2nd Stage Partners.

The partner group consists of Freed, ForeSee’s former vice president of product John Williams, ForeSee’s former vice president of business development Aaron Watson, ForeSee’s former vice president of sales Cia McCaffrey, ForeSee’s former CMO David Scott and ForeSee’s former director of product marketing Sarah Allen-Short. Combined, the group has more than 140 years of experience in professional business development.

Second Stage's mission is to help companies grow to and through the “second stage” by implementing successful business methods that have helped their other companies succeed.

A second-stage company is typically defined as one that is just past the startup stage, but not grown to full maturity and tends to have anywhere from $1 million to $100 million in total receipts.

“I met with a bunch of companies after I left ForeSee and I noticed that there were a lot of really good ideas and there are a lot of great efforts to help companies get started. There’s an enormous and growing and productive ecosystem for helping get companies started, but they were having problems getting companies to that second stage,” Freed said.

“It’s the go-to-market strategy that companies typically struggle with. Everybody kind of agreed that there was a void there. There are challenges that are different in Michigan that you might not find in New York or the Bay Area. In this area we don’t really have enough people who have been there and done it (taking companies to the next level). We thought we could bring part of our ForeSee team back together to help companies make that next step.”

Freed said that his company will work through a three-step phase that includes not just consulting, but also step-in execution to allow seasoned professionals to oversee the execution of the growth process.

Phase one is the “growth readiness assessment” in which 2nd Stage Partners conducts a thorough appraisal of sales, marketing, technology, product management, human capital, service/support, delivery, and go-to-market strategy and execution in order to assess the capabilities and identify and prioritize areas of focus.

Phase two is called the “strategic roadmap.” During this phase Freed said his company would pinpoint the most capital-efficient priorities in order to quickly increase revenue and synchronize the business.

During phase three, the “execution services” phase, 2nd Stage Partners offers its step-in services that complement the existing team and accelerate growth. Freed said that he and his partners will serve as mentors or coaches to existing staff or can serve as interim members of the executive team by heading up the areas identified as the biggest priorities in phase two.

“We’re talking to between half a dozen and a dozen companies right now. We have to make sure a company has the need (for our services), where they have a product and they’ve started to sell it – a product that’s been proven with the scalability to make it work, and in a perfect world it’s a company that has already started to get funding to make that product work,” Freed said.

Second Stage will focus primarily on business growth in the state of Michigan, specifically those in Ann Arbor and Metro Detroit.

Freed said that one of the ultimate goals of his new company is to help Michigan retain talent that tends to go away after smaller companies are bought out by larger ones.

“One of the challenges we have is that a lot of companies have good talent and if that company gets sold, a lot of that talent goes away,” he said.

“We feel that when you’ve got more size to you (as in the case of ForeSee, which had about 300 employees before its acquisition) there will be more people that will stay in the area and they can get seeded into other companies.”

Second Stage has already gained the support of organizations like the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, Tech Transfer at the University of Michigan, and Updata Partner, among other companies.

“The kinds of skills that make a great startup don’t necessarily translate to and through the second stage,” Ken Nisbet, associate vice president of Tech Transfer said in a statement.

“Early-stage companies need the experienced, proven expertise offered by 2nd Stage Partners to identify not only where they need help, but to actually step in and execute the strategy, all while mentoring the staff who will be doing it long term.”